Guardener

Guardener is a game from the fine folks at Sokpop Collective, who also brought us Stacklands. And just like Stacklands, Guardener looks super simple at a glance, but it’s hiding a pretty complex game beneath its minimalistic visual design and easy-to-grasp concepts. In fact, Guardener can be downright brutal.

So I’m going to give you some tips to help you survive longer in this game. These tips are the result of me bashing myself against the door over and over again until it finally burst open. I mean this metaphorically, of course; I didn’t break a physical door. What I’m saying is that I approached the game bullheadedly and lost countless times before finally learning the mechanics that would allow me to be successful.

To prevent you from bashing your own head into any metaphorical doors (or real ones, I suppose), I’m going to share what I’ve learned.

Picking up workers

Guardener

The pathing in this game is really, really bad. Way too often, a worker will get stuck behind another worker, or a fighter will get stuck on a rock during an attack. Thankfully, you can just use the mouse to pick up any playable character and move it around. Keep this trick in mind if you see your workers getting stuck a lot.

Understanding the “Sell” mechanic

Guardener

Okay, so this one tip can be the difference between success and failure in Guardener: You need to exploit the “Sell” mechanic if you want to survive more than a couple days.

Basically, vegetables sell for the exact amount that you bought the seeds for. Potato seeds cost $2, and a potato sells for $2. At a glance, this makes it seem like selling vegetables is kind of worthless. But that’s only accounting for selling one at a time.

If you sell multiples of the same type of vegetable, you will get a multiplier. For example:

  • 1 potato = $2
  • 2 potatoes = $6
  • 3 potatoes = $10

As you can see, this is where you start making money. So you always want to sell your units at least two at a time (but more than that whenever possible).

Healing vs. selling

Guardener

If one of your combatants is injured (has low health), you can have it rest inside the house to heal. There are a couple downsides to this. The obvious one is that the worker will be temporarily unavailable. The less obvious one is that sometimes your produce gets stuck in the house. This is a known bug, but it can prevent one fighter to be permanently stuck in the house, rendering the house unusable for the rest of the run.

A better option is simply selling the fighter and regrowing it, especially if you can sell two injured fighters at a time.

When it comes to your gnome, though, resting in the house is going to have to do.

Potatoes vs. carrots

Guardener

Should you grow potatoes or carrots? Both cost $2 to plant, but carrots are only fighters, while potatoes are both fighters and workers. As far as I can tell, both scale at the same value (I haven’t tested this at really high quantities), and while carrots are more powerful than the potatoes, the additional DPS doesn’t seem super noticeable in the early part of the game. For example, carrots can kill a worm in two hits, while it takes three hits for a potato to kill that same worm.

And don’t accidentally buy a carrot seed because it looks like a potato. I do that way more often than I should. For reference, the highlighted seed is the potato seed:

Guardener - Potato Seed

Anyway, potatoes are the more valuable crop in the early game, even though they cost the same amount as carrots. Later on, when you really need to squeeze every last hit point out of your enemies as fast as possible, carrots will be the better option, but hopefully by then you’ll have a lot of workers and you won’t have to worry about your fighters pulling double-duty.

Expanding your garden

Guardener

You can expand your growing area if you de-select all workers and press one of the arrows that appears around your house. One plot of land costs $1, with a catch. If you buy out your land horizontally, you will have to pay more to expand vertically, and vice versa. That’s because if you expand outward from a 1×1 grid, your next move will be 1 square, but if you expand from a 2×1 grid, one dimension will expand by 2 squares, while the other will expand by 1. Make sense?

More accurately, you start with a 3×3 grid. If you expand from there, you’re buying a 3×1 plot of land. So, you’re at 4×3. If you want to expand in the other direction, you’re now buying four plots of land instead of three. Does that make a little more sense?

However, I should let you know that you don’t want to expand too quickly. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend expanding at all until you’ve completed the first boss fight and progressed to summer. You need all that money for building your army.

Watering your crops

Guardener

You water crops by grabbing a water droplet and dropping it onto a piece of soil that has a seed on it. However, if your worker is set to water crops, they will always grab a droplet if one appears. Every seed only requires a single drop in order to grow, so once all your seeds have been watered, you want to make sure you don’t have the watering option selected so your workers are doing something more productive.

You can buy a hose to produce more water, but you probably won’t need to do that until you reach the second season.

Letting grass grow

Guardener

Grass always spreads to a space next to it. So if you keep the space around your soil clear, it shouldn’t get overgrown. If it does get overgrown, though, you can always weed the area to uncover the soil. Once the grass is removed, the soil should be exactly how it was when you left it, except you’ll need to re-water it if there’s a seed there. You won’t need to re-till the soil, and you won’t lose anything that’s already started growing in that space.

Surviving Moon 1

Guardener

At the end of the first moon, you need to fight a snail. Unlike the worms you’ll fight earlier in the day, snails will fight back. So by the end of this day, you’re going to need at least one additional fighter besides your gnome. The snail will defeat a single fighter in combat, but with two, you will survive the fight.

This is actually pretty easy, so I wouldn’t sweat it.

In fact, my general strategy is to grow three onions as soon as possible, then sell them, then use the onion money to start buying potato seeds. I can usually finish Moon 1 with three potatoes, which I then sell to start buying more potatoes the next day.

Surviving Moon 2

Guardener - Moon 2

At the end of the second moon, you will fight three snails. For this, you will need at least four fighters. If you want to guarantee that you’ll get through this without casualties, it’s better to have at least five.

Also, if one fighter gets dangerously low on health, you can pick it up with the mouse and move it away from danger while the others keep attacking.

Surviving Moon 3

Guardener

At the end of the third moon, you’re going to have to fight your first boss. It’s a mole with a ton of health, so the fight can be absolutely brutal. I generally try to have at least six fighters by the time the mole appears, but the more the better.

If you can beat the mole, you’ll complete the game’s first season and move into summer! And if you’ve made it to summer, you’ve got some serious Guardener skill!

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